This exhibition (which has just closed* at City Gallery) is titled after the practice of naming the huge industrial vehicles operating on Antarctic bases after various wives and girlfriends – a practice discontinued briefly after this particular somewhat-hilarious-yet-appalling nomenclature was applied to a bloody big crane, giving any woman in the area a pretty good indication of how things worked in the harsh, mostly-male environment of Ross Island.

The exhibition is made up of several sections, including a catalogue of impressive portraits of the vehicles used on McMurdo Station, photographed by Noble in 2008, and an epic text called Dear Misty, hand-lettered by Maxey along an entire wall of the gallery and addressed by Jones to a vehicle he obviously thought quite a lot of, in the same way that Robbie Burns liked haggis.

*Sorry about that.

Another frustratingly conservative exhibition in Wellington’s highest-profile public art space. There’s nothing technically wrong with Dieneke Jansen and Jenny Gilliam’s photographs of native shrubs, which have been carefully arranged so it looks as though they’re growing inside the enormous panels along Courtenay Place. It’s good to finally see an exhibition which considers the unusual proportions of the light boxes right from the start, instead of just awkwardly cropping an existing photo. Unfortunately the photos are not particularly interesting, and using the Latin names of the native shrubs as titles just looks pretentious.

The artist statement says the exhibition seeks to “engage with concepts of nature as a social construct and the mediated ways in which urban dwellers experience it”, which is all very laudable except for the fact that Wellington is not exactly a soulless urban concrete desert – the panels are already surrounded by bloody trees, and the fact that the real trees will lose their leaves in winter while the photos stay green is not quite enough to blow my tiny mind. If you want to experience evergreen nature in that particular part of Courtenay Place, it’s fairly easy to turn to the right and look at Mount Victoria – it’s teeming with it.

I understand that street art needs to be accessible, but too many of the Light Box exhibitions have played it safe, producing work which challenges and enlightens no-one. Compare it with the fine and daring sculptures in the City Gallery’s The Obstinate Object exhibition and you’ll see what I mean.

Unusually for a sports drink, this is quite refreshing, with a pleasant lemony taste. It’s made in Malaysia and has the amount of salt and sugar (about 6 teaspoons) you’d expect in an isotonic drink. The zeros in the logo are interlinked, which under new British laws “protecting” the Olympic brand is probably enough for a death sentence.

The ad copy on the can is remarkably free of hyperbole, although there’s a little diagram of a splayed man (with a blue torso and red legs – has he been dipped in lava?) with a raindrop wireframe behind him. You can almost hear the Tron: Legacysoundtrack. Science!

I saw this last week, but forgot to mention it. It’s not as bad as you’d think from the Ishtar – Heaven’s Gate comparisons. All of the woes mentioned in the press are due to its lame loss-of-nerve marketing campaign (witness the crucial loss of “of Mars” from the title, after the failure of Disney’s Mars Needs Moms last year).

It’s never going to be as successful as Avatar, but it’ll be the sort of thing people rent or download with equal enjoyment. At its worst, it’s half an hour too long and there’s far too much arsing about in the Martian desert*. At its best there’s lots of lovely production design – if the Star Wars prequels had been this good, people would still love George Lucas.

Admittedly, due to the vintage and influence of the story it’s in a slightly awkward position – hard-to follow, but also over-familiar. The framing story is lots of fun – See! Edgar Rice Burroughs, befuddled! Yes, it’s very silly, but it’s nice to see a sci-fi film that isn’t a superhero property, play-it-safe sequel, or handjob for the US military.

*The same can be said of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline.

Out of the Dusk
by Joanna Langford
Wellington Sculpture Trust’s Four Plinths Sculpture Project

This installation has been up for a month now, with two years to go. Will it survive that long? The plinth sculpture series got off to a strong start four years ago with Regan Gentry’s humorous wire tree sculptures, then stumbled with Peter Trevelyn’s sadly non-kinetic Mimetic Brotherhood installation. The latest set of sculptures (formerly known as The Quietening) are made from wire and tattered wisps of silage wrapping sealed atop the massive plinths inside glass boxes, and look like concept models from Avatar, or a home-made playset for the Sylvanian Families. Already the plastic is bleaching from exposure to the sun – what’s it going to look like by 2014?

First Contact by Michel Tuffery
NZ International Festival of the Arts
12th February – 18th March

It took me a while to get around to seeing this, which is ridiculous as it’s just down the road from where I live. Tuffery has designed a clever film projection (a collage of images from the discovery and inventory of New Zealand) which wraps around the benighted front of Te Papa. The performance lasts for ninety minutes and is supposed to begin at “dusk”, but in practice we hung around for nearly an hour after dusk until it began, and even then there was half an hour of rather dull ambient visuals to sit through before the film proper began.

One small problem… and it might’ve just been on the night I saw it, but where was the bloody sound? Without sound it was, well, pretty to look at, but sitting through ninety minutes was not something I want to repeat. There were a couple of audience members watching it under ideal circumstances, but this involved being massively stoned and with a private iPod soundtrack of something groovy and lysergic.

An educational yet somewhat sparse exhibition assembled from the Victoria & Albert collection, which is appropriate seeing as dear little Vicky set the modern template for Western weddings. I probably wouldn’t have paid to see it, but that’s just me. There were basically two kinds of people here: design students checking out the asthenopia-inducing frock details, and retired couples gazing raptly at a video compilation of British royal weddings*. There was one other heterosexual male there apart from me, glumly surveying a case containing two snazzy frock coats – for a civil service, natch.

It was interesting to see how one of humankind’s oldest ceremonies (inflated and sanitized like a bleached souffléby the Victorians, like everything else they got their hands on) has withstood the past two centuries of wars, recession and Lady Di. The bride ceased to be an chattel and began to be more of a fashion plate – is this progress? Well, she’s still an object, but she has more say in how she looks now.

This exhibition uses the same boxes as last year’s Early Encounters exhibition, which prevents the 1970s monstrosities from infecting the others. Actually, those are some of the more fun dresses – most of the rest are tasteful but a little dull unless you like acres of cream silk, and there’s a few too many space-fillers in the form of gigantic digital prints of glamour weddings. The most modern dresses feature some amazing fabric engineering, but are also utterly bonkers, like a meringue designed by H. R. Giger.

I wanted to see Dita Von Teese’s enormous purple dress (by Vivienne Westwood, and I didn’t need to check how to spell either of those splendid names). Alarmingly, Von Teeses’s dress comes with matching corset and lingerie, which conjours the sobering image of a priapic Marilyn Manson ripping them off with his teeth… but again, that could just be little me.

*Luckily they weren’t playing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony over the top of it.